Actually I noticed quite a bit of difference between the beach on St. George Island up near here, and when we were down on Manasota Key. The coquinas and small sand crabs are completely gone from the beach up here. None of the small life you normally see at the wet beach line is here. Haven't seen much of the ghost crabs that you normally see scurrying over the dry sand, neither. But on the plus side, the bugs haven't been as bad. For what that is worth. Birds are slowly coming back, but no where near what you see on the more southern beaches. Been lots of seaweed washing up the last few times we were at St. George.
Word is that local seafood is just darn hard to come by these days. Nearly all of it around here is being imported. The local seafood house Connie used to work at part time was getting a lot of their "local" seafood from Amelia Island over on the east coast. And I don't believe a single word of the official hype that the Gulf of Mexico seafood is perfectly safe to eat.
All in all Connie and I are just not eating seafood that comes out of these waters except in very rare occasions. I used to eat shrimp maybe four times a week, with fish fairly often as well. Not any more. Pretty darn sad to think that the seafood being imported from China might actually be healthier and safer to eat than the stuff coming directly out of our own Gulf of Mexico.
And had an odd thing happen after the last time Connie and I went down to Manasota Key back in November. We only got our feet wet walking on the beaches as it was way too cold to swim. Not to mention the red tide, which made breathing difficult when the wind was blowing in off of the Gulf. Anyway, when we came back home, about a week later we had skin sloughing off of the bottoms of our feet in large patches. I had pink and tender heels for a few weeks after that, as the skin that sloughed off was pretty thick, basically removing the callouses normally there. I was seriously worried about this for a while. Never EVER had that happen before.
While walking on St. George, we really didn't feel comfortable even having our feet in those waters. Probably a GOOD thing, too.
In my opinion, BP messed up the Gulf of Mexico BIG TIME. Certainly shot to hell our plans of the paradise we had hoped for during retirement. We had planned on spending most of our time on the beaches, and I certainly wanted to eat as much seafood as humanly possible. I was thinking about even taking up scuba diving as a hobby. Now, I have no intentions of swimming AT ALL in the Gulf of Mexico. At least not up in this part of the Gulf. And I have to wonder how safe it is even breathing those breezes blowing in off of the water. It will probably be a rather long time before the Gulf returns to being close to normal up around here. Maybe never in our lifetimes. Maybe the more southern beaches escaped the brunt of this disaster. I sure as hell hope so.
As an aside, have you taken note of the size of the fines, penalties, and other expenditures that BP is making on restitution (such that it is)? So tell me, exactly how much profit do you think these oil companies are making? And try to tell me that a lot of those profits aren't being used to grease political palms to insure that their profits will stay that way....
So why exactly is it that gasoline is so expensive? Even at the cost of torpedoing the economic recovery of our country?
Yeah, greased wheels.......